Your life in words

Here is what I like about seeing hockey highlights on television. On the box scores you get to see lines like “Satan shot on goal”. It makes for a much more interesting sports recap knowing that the devil himself laced up the skates tonight but was still only held to one shot. He needs a lot more help on the wings.

Played trivia tonight and did not have one of my better performances. I’ll be lazy and blame the categories as opposed to any lack of knowledge on my part. I’m just not going to be able to contribute much when a quarter of the game is devoted to Grey’s Anatomy and Name the Royals Player Based on their Picture. Heck, I only knew two of the Mortal Kombat characters because I only played that game once in my life. Now if it was Virtua Fighter I would have run the darn thing. Screw fatalities, I want to play the game where I can master drunken Kung Fu.

It’s incredibly late right now so I’ll finish off just by writing about something interesting I’ve discovered over the past few days. Ok, discovered is not the right word but I’ve now seen firsthand the effects of it. I’m nearing the ten year anniversary of starting my writer’s journal which later morphed into the blog so I’ve been going through my old entries. It’s also been part of my novel research because I wanted to tap into certain parts of my past to tell the story.

What I’ve found by going through these entries is that I have documented entire swaths of my life. Events that I had completely forgotten were all there written in my bad grammar and stream of consciousness style. There were entire conversations that I recapped that now strike me as fascinating. I could even point to my first recollections of meeting someone and all that has happened since that moment. It is really amazing to have such a record of your life.

But the strange thing is that once the blog started what I wrote about has changed. The writer’s journal was always meant to be just for me (and my future biographers. Can’t forget them.) It didn’t have an audience. It was just my attempt at cataloguing my life in a way to clear out some of the thoughts in my head. As a result it was straightforward and truthful even if in some cases there were stories I didn’t tell because I didn’t want a record of them. And while the blog is truthful (at least within the 75% rule) my subject matter has really changed. I no longer write about myself in the same way. It’s not just that entire posts revolve around My Beloved Lindsay. I tend to write much less about the people in my life.

It’s mainly a case of what I would like to share to the whole world. I hide parts of myself. Not very well but I do hide them. Some people would probably be less than pleased to discover that I am writing about them and posting it online. Plus, I have a horrible feeling that if I would ever write about something good happening in my life I would jinx it and it would go south immediately. So the blog has taken on more of a resemblance to a daily newspaper column than a personal journal.

In some ways that is good. It’s more enjoyable for others to read and I am a lot funnier this way. Plus, sometimes my life is so boring even I don’t want to read about it and I doubt many people are that interested in the ups and downs and more downs and so far down that you come out the other side of my romantic life. But I miss not having a record of it. When I look back at the past couple of years I won’t be able to point to a passage and go “See, this is what I thought the moment I met you.” Maybe what I’ll write will become a little more personal (especially now that I don’t have the spectre of a company blogging policy hanging over me.) Maybe I’ll just write more pieces that are only for my eyes. But I’d like to find a way to keep a record of my real life.

Enjoy the weekend everyone. Go to hell Carolina. I’m not cheering for Kansas, I’m cheering against Carolina.